One New Zealand (One NZ) reported various boosts to its customer service three months after deploying generative AI (GenAI) capabilities from AWS to improve services in its call centres.

The operator stated customer trust improved 10 per cent with the same level of improvement in the number reporting they had spoken with knowledgeable and friendly staff.

One NZ developed the GenAI platform using Amazon SageMaker “a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning models” along with AWS Lambda, “a server-less compute service”.

The GenAI set-up “analyses customer questions and issues generated from thousands of calls a day, and provides call agents recommendations on how to respond to incoming calls, enabling instant data-driven insights”.

It was integrated into Amazon Connect, a cloud contact centre used by more than 1,500 One NZ staff over voice and chat channels to answer more than 330,000 customer requests each month.

One NZ taught the AI using thousands of call transcripts, which were categorised by products and outcomes.

The set-up records, transcribes and processes every customer service call within ten seconds of a call ending, removing the need for manual data entry. It also produces a summary of what was discussed, contact history and action taken by the agent.

One NZ stated the system can also pick up language sentiment such as sarcasm and process basic Maori language along with a variety of accents.

It is developing additional functionality including an interface for agents to search and access examples of customer issues in real-time, or identify potential network issues before they occur.